Well traditional punctuation rules state that two independent clauses need to be separated either by a full stop / exclamation mark, or by a semicolon. Thus the following is quite proper: I hate him so much; he killed my dog. Now if you go back a

football is a popular sport played almost in all Asain and European countries. There is no direct agent here but it's still a passive structure. That sentence is not in the passive voice. Football is a popular sport played in almost all As

I believe that the ghost that has appeared before me truly is my father’s spirit, and that everything it has said is true. The ghost did not flee before Horatio’s “cross,” and it shows Christian forbearance towards my “common” mother. Thus, I

Hi Huxley, Welcome to the forum. Yes, you are correct. Question marks (?) and exclamation marks (!) always show that the sentence (not clause) has ended, in the same way as a full stop. Therefore, you need to start the next word, which is

A sentence begins with a capital and ends with a full-stop - or a question mark in the case of an interrogative sentence, an exclamation mark for an exclamative sentence -. There can be different clauses in a sentence.

From "A Grammar of Contemporary English", by R. Quirk et al. Both question and exclamation mark exclude the use of other separation punctuation and have the value of a period inasmuch as what follows begins with the capitalisation of a new

There's a US/UK split on common practice here. And it's more a typesetting question than an actual English usage question, as I see it. What about handwritesetting? :-) Maybe some would compromise by writing the fullstop or comma directly

We have waited long but not in vain: http://www.bbspot.com/News/2004/05/quartercolon.html "The International Grammar Standards Organization has approved the quartercolon for use starting in June of 2004. This is the first new punctuation mark

Thanks for everyone's suggestions. I've learned a lot, even though there seems to be no definitively correct way to write this. Anyway, I've decided to drop all the hyphens. See, I'd feel uneasy about using hyphens in one of the